From the archive (1990): Mike Freakman on the culture wars, with special reference to Dick Cheney

Like Big Dick "Don't-Pull-My" Cheney said in a briefing a few days ago: "Either they play ball or we cut off their balls -- or find someone who will."

I could not find a publisher for this piece in 1990; it is published here for the first time. With Cheney in the news this week, the work came to mind –– anyway for the last line. In 1990, Cheney was the Secretary of War under Bush I.

Report from Washington

by Mike Freakman

Washington, D.C., Sept. 15, 1990 – Senator Laughton O'Buoy (R-GA) charged today that there were twenty "pipe-smoking" drug addicts in the State Department. "Drug users and sympathizers have infiltrated the news media, education, and the arts," Sen. O'Buoy told Stifled Yawn in an exclusive interview. "We are beginning to see a close connection between drugs, pornography, and flag burning." Sen. O'Buoy heads the Senate Select Committee on Un-American Activities. "We intend to bring the whole management at State down here and ask them clear and simple: `Are you now or have you ever been a drug user.'" He said the government officials were supplied with drugs through membership in highly secret "cells" and that their primary loyalty was to these cells. "If they've left their cells -- fine. Then let them prove their allegiances by giving us the names of those they know or suspect to be drug users or sympathizers." O'Buoy said that drug users -- reformed or not -- should be barred from employment in which "they have significant exposure to the public." "We need drug tests to ensure our national security. In my mind they are even more important to the drug war than loyalty oaths were to the Crusade against Communism some years back." "I've tested my own children", Sen. O'Buoy confided, "and all but one of the results have been very encouraging." Declaring his motto to be "sub-zero tolerance," Sen O'Buoy explained that "tolerance is corrosive to the fabric of traditional American values. We have never been a tolerant country, it goes against the very most profoundest grains of our national being." "There are millions that are presently being used for rehabilitation and treatment that would be much better spent on drug testing," Sen. O'Buoy said. Citing a "skewed moral agenda," O'Buoy said money now spent on AIDS testing would be better spent on comprehensive drug tests for the high-school age population. Just as bad as the drug users are the sympathizers and legalizers, according to the Senator. "These are nothing more than fellow travelers working in cahoots with Pinko front organizations dedicated to our losing the war against the international drug conspiracy. I know in my own state these people are mostly New York Jew lawyers trying to stir up trouble." "If people think they can escape from our great country by taking drugs, then I say they ought to go back from where they came from -- and let the professional sympathizers go back to Israel where they can do some good keeping down the Arabs, who are basically a bunch of drug addicts, especially the Iraqis." Noting the high incidence of drug use among African-Americans, Sen O'Buoy commented, "They should go back to Africa. They have betrayed the noble aspirations of their forefathers who came to America searching for a new and better life." Reflecting on the growing number of drug users, Sen. O'Buoy wondered out loud, "Why can't they use prescription products and cigarettes like the rest of us? I see nothing wrong with unwinding with a pint or two of fortified wine, one of the finest products of our state. That's why we repealed Prohibition." Sen. O'Buoy insisted that the drug issue was nonpartisan. "All parties would be better to take the right side on this one, so what's the difference?" Like Big Dick "Don't-Pull-My" Cheney said in a briefing a few days ago: "Either they play ball or we cut off their balls -- or find someone who will."

“A major poet for our time — & then some – Charles Bernstein has emerged as a principal voice –maybe the best we have – for an international avant-garde now in its second century of visions & revisions." – Jerome Rothenberg on The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein.

"A superb poet and great inventor of poetry, Charles Bernstein dazzlingly invents the essay for poetry: professing in a gorilla suit and white tuxedo.”—George Lakoff

Robert Creeley: "Bernstein’s is the most provocatively intelligent reaction to the general drift of mainstream poetry, and he is an indefatigable writer of essays and poems wherein the determinations of genre are largely superseded. In short, he has not only given brilliant instance of the confusions of contemporary social and political premises but has done so in remarkable constructs of their characteristic modes of statement, which are not simply parodic but rather reclamations, recyclings, of otherwise degraded material." ––"Help Is on the Way" in The American Book Review (Vol.14, No. 6, 1993), p. 18.